Friday, April 17, 2015

Extreme Music

A riff on 'Extreme Music and the appeal thereof' from 2007, which was written for someone else's book but not ever actually used, the time-wasting twat-head (said affectionately but with an under note of annoyance)

EXTREME MUSIC

What is the attraction of extreme music? What can
"extreme" even mean nowadays, when the outer limits in every
conceivable direction seem to have been probed? Besides, extremity depends on
context and expectation. If
"extreme" has any meaning at all,shouldn't it be in reference to extremity
of affect, the intensity of what the listener experiences? But then, as we can
all surely attest, it's often the softest songs, the most gently seductive and
caressing sounds, that cut you up most cruelly. Bursting into tears is a pretty
extreme reaction to a piece of music, but I can't think of any noise record or
avant-garde work that has done that to me. Whereas Al Green's "I'm Still
In Love With You" or The Smiths' "There is A Light That Never
Goes Out" infallibly devastate. The
most recent thing to make this grown man sob was Kraftwerk's "Autobahn",
an innovative piece of music on many levels, but not really "extreme"
or noisy, on the contrary, all euphony and Beach Boys-like honey to the ears.
What choked me up wasn't the poignant
melody but the sheer aesthetic majesty of it, the spirit behind the work.

Conversely, I once fell asleep in a Galas
concert (and I was a fan and admirer of her music!). The singer was aiming to
conjure Old Testament levels of affliction, abjection and grief (the work was
inspired by AIDS as a modern day plague). Yet the undifferentiated pitch of
mind-rending anguish had the effect of lulling me into a doze. On the level of
affect, Galas's work was on the same level as Mantovani. Or a mug of Horlicks.

Nonetheless I remain obsessively drawn to the abstract
and out-there in music, and I'm not exactly sure why. That's not unusual: often
there seems to be a gap between the reasons we give for liking or validating
certain kinds of music and what's really going. With noise, free jazz/improv,
avant-classical, et al, there's a tendency to talk in terms of subversion or
challenge, an assault on staid sensibilities. The music is envisioned as an
edifying ordeal, a salutary and spiritually uplifting violation that will
expand the listener's horizons. But in this scenario it's always some Other
that is being tested and transformed; by definition, we are the the always already
expanded. If you approach
a work of art expecting to be challenged, you're no longer in a place where that
can happen.

Terms like
"innovative", "groundbreaking", "pioneering", are
equally problematic, because once you get past the first few listens, the music
necessarily becomes familiar; what was abstract and amorphous starts to take on
a shape, ceases to be disorientating. It's impossible to repeat the shock of
the new.

This is even more the case when we listen to avant-garde
music from a long time ago--Varese's pre-World War 2 compositions, the early
musique concrete of Pierres Henry and Schaeffer, Stockhausen's elektronische
works, or, in rock terms, Velvet Underground, early Throbbing Gristle, et al.

So what is going on when we go back as
listeners to experience a past breakthrough? Is that sensation even
recoverable, given that the present we inhabit is one where the breakthrough is
taken for granted, commonplace, perhaps
even institutionally sanctioned to the point of seeming worthy.

Clearly there's
a large element of projection by the historically-informed listener, a kind of
mental restaging of the moment of bursting through into the unknown. Curious
and paradoxical this may be, but it's absolutely integral to my enjoyment of
the music. Indeed it results in an arguably unreasonable bias against
contemporary artists working in those fields, on the grounds that, however
accomplished their work is, they are
settlers not pioneers; what Philip Sherburne calls an après-garde.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

my assertion of being compulsively drawn to the extreme is somewhat in contradiction to the opinion that Extremity is passe as voiced in this Over-Rated of 1997 bit (but then consistency is the hobgoblin of etc etc) which ran on the old Website Blissout aka A White Brit Raver Thinks Aloud. I wonder if you can guess who the unnamed opponent that is not-strawmanned-not-at-all-actually at the start of the piece?

EXTREMITY

There's a certain strain of argument being touted in which the extremities

(global as well as musical) are where it's all happening--from freeform improv

to Jap-core noise, from NZ drone-scapes to quirked out neo-Krautrock to